


Big Enough(to hold your love)

by Jazzybot4 (SniperinaJumper)



Category: Supernatural, The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Dean was in New Orleans during Katrina, Destiny is a cunt, Found Family, Gen, Jazzys get home prompt-a-thon 2020, M/M, Set during season 4 of spn, Temporary Character Death, The kind of thing that could be a meet cute but isn't, There's not really any trigger warnings in this, Timeline What Timeline, there is no plan here I'm just making shit up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25985323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SniperinaJumper/pseuds/Jazzybot4
Summary: Destiny is a cunt, Andy thinks, as they wake up again with the ozone-sweet taste of new blood and apple pie in their mouths. Why now, when she's mortal? Why is it now that they're awakening seemingly one after the other?In another life, Dean Winchester was ever only human.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 149





	Big Enough(to hold your love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lynati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynati/gifts).



> A special thanks to Lynati, for her support in my journey home. 
> 
> Prefacing this with I have only seen the film, multiple times, not read the comics yet. This is sort of film compliant, and Supernatural through Season Four compliant. I’m fucking with the end of the world a bit, Deans second Death. I’m also moving The Old Guard back a bit, to match up to the Supernatural timelines. Nile was found in 2008, the year before Dean died for Sam. His second death, as it happens. Castiel isn’t making an appearance in this one.

The little things were, in the end, always what gave them away. The nightmares that they tried to lay to rest as dreams. The kind of creeping, consuming ache that was missing the other half of your soul. Destinies, Andromache had learned, had a bad habit of catching up to you and making themselves nuisances. In Andys case, that meant that the immortals in her little cluster were fated to grow in number.    
  
She didn’t remember falling asleep, against the wall of the safe house. Napping, catching REM where she could, she supposed. Thousands of years of experience meaning that she always slept in small doses. She wasn’t formally on watch, but she was busy watching over them. With what time she had left, she thought.   
  
The man fell under claws that could not be seen, screaming as he was torn apart. But something *slipped*, and where a corpse should have lain there, there was only blood staining a cement floor, and the face of another man, screaming his name as he coughed up blood from torn internal organs knitting themselves together. Death turning one more of them away. A warrior, she felt the knife and gun calluses on his hands, felt the weight of his weapons in holsters that would do him no good.    
  
Andy saw him in vivid color, green eyes and a soft mouth and terror, right before he fell. Heard the other man scream his name. Felt the other mans name on her mouth, his mouth as he breathed his last.    
  


In one breath, they all gasped awake, Nicky still gagging and choking on the taste of blood. He’d never been graceful about these dreams, Andy knew. The eldest woman scanned them, taking head count automatically, cataloging their reactions and figuring out where they were looking, to try and pinpoint their newest hunt. 

  
“He’s in America. The South.” Nile said, voice soft as she looked over at Andy. The youngest of them dreaming the most specific still. Joe had rolled for his sketchbook as the dream settled in their bones. That draw, the pull of them all being dragged to a single point would haunt them for a few more days, and then fade. Until the next dream woke them all, deaths shared.    
  
“Another one. So soon.” Nicky rasped, hand coming to his mouth. “He tastes like sweet things.” he said, grasping for fading details. Always he had the strongest sensations, the swiftest to fade. Only Booker had been stronger with them, and even now Andy knew Booker would be dreaming of it. Nicky reached out for Joe, finding him warm and whole, the ritual of the pair of them complete now as the panic faded. Nicky looked to Joe as sailors looked to the North Star, guiding him home always.    
  
“Apple pie.” Joe replied, pencil scrubbing over rough paper, outlining a strong jaw, terrified eyes. Green, Andy remembered. A brighter shade than the other man standing over him. Green and his mouth soft. His hair, golden-brown. Tall and broad and feeling small, though he towered over most of them. He smelled like gun oil and cinnamon.   
  
“His name is Dean. There’s someone who saw.” she responded, rolling forward to her feet. “We’ve got to move fast.” They were in Havana, it wouldn’t be hard to get to the continent from here. If he was that close, no wonder she could still feel the adrenaline spike of his terror.    
  
“His brother.” Joe said, voice firm. “He is no danger. I think. I hope. He felt like the center of the whole universe.” and he scrubbed the pencil harder over the line of a dark, terrified mouth. “If we are very lucky, we will not have to fight this one.”    
  
“Optimist.” Nicky accused, but he was already shaking his head, moving to tuck himself against Joes side, needing the reassurance of the other mans bulk to chase off the last of the nightmare shakes. “We always have to fight.” and he grinned, small and sharp at Nile, who bared her teeth back at him in a friendly snarl just left of a smile. Her teeth were very white in her face, under her summer-tan. That still took getting used to, when it used to be sardonic smirks coming from the fourth slot on their formation.   
  
“I’ll call the boat.” Andy said, finding her phone. “Pack up. We’re moving out.”    
  
“Yes boss!” came three voices, achingly missing one that she would dearly love to have back. She missed Booker like she missed a limb.    
  
Sebastien had made his choice, she knew. He’d have to live with it. Just as she would have to die with it.    
  


Destiny, as she had observed already this very early morning, was a cunt.    
  
\-----------------------------------   
  
“So.”   
  
Sam let the big machine coast to a stop on the scenic overlook that they’d come to as the sun rose. Dean was curled up in the passenger seat for once, blankly staring at the horizon. They couldn’t have stayed in Tupelo, but now they were three hours from New Orleans, and Sam didn’t know what would happen if he took Dean to that city.    
  
He remembered that Dean had been there, for the hurricane. He knew that Dean still had nightmares that he laughed off, whenever the storms got rough. Sam remembered these little things, it seemed, always in hindsight. It was so easy to take his brother for granted, he mused. Dean took himself for granted, most days. Dean was so good at fading into the woodwork, the scaffolding of their lives that Sam forgot sometimes that Dean wasn’t an institution, and was just a man.    
  
“Want to talk about it?” Sam ventured after a moment, and Dean didn’t say anything. Just burrowed deeper into his coat, the big thing that he’d gotten when Sam was small, from some thrift store or another. Leather like armor, big enough to grow into he’d joked. Dean hadn’t grown into it completely, but it always made him look larger than life.The Coat was like a blanket now, tucked around Dean as he shivered.    
  
“I don’t know what happened.” Dean said after a few moments. “I was dead, Sammy. I was Dead. I was at the Gates. I knew that the Hounds had got me.” he swallowed, a wet sound that reminded Sam of the blood he’d watched his brother choke on. Drown in. “Then I woke up.” he said, voice small and confused, a sort of noise Dean should never have been able to make.    
  
“We’ll figure it out.” Sam said. “Maybe one of the rituals worked…maybe it’s because we’ve been trying so hard to get out of the deal…” he said, unsure but wanting to be hopeful. “You’re still…you’re still you. All the tests came back clear, perfectly human and perfectly yourself.” he ventured.    
  
“I hope so.” Dean said, voice smaller than Sam had ever heard it. “I really fuckin’ hope so, Sammy.”    
  
What could Sam do to that but put Baby in gear, and drive them to ‘anywhere but here’.    
  
  
  
\--------------

The Hellhounds had found him. Dean knew that he’d never outrun them, hadn't even tried. He knew that he was going to die, because he wanted to save Sam. Sammy, his world. The only one he had any faith in anymore.    
  
For a value of faith. Dean knew that Angels and Demons were real, knew that there was something hanging over his family. A curse, he’d always thought. The kind of thing that meant that they would never have peace. That every good thing they did for people would never pay off some sort of karmic debt they’d been left with, inherited from far-forgotten ancestors.    
  
But Sam had come back. So had he. Was that a curse? Or a blessing? He’d fought so long and so hard to keep them alive, that it seemed that he wasn’t ever going to let them die.   
  
But he’d let himself die, for Sam. Because he had faith in Sammy, in that kid who wanted to save the world. Who thought they were on a righteous mission to stop the end of the world. And he’d been turned away at the gates, to wake up covered in blood, his cuts healing like they’d never opened. The kind of thing that only happened in fairy tales, or the really bad ending comic books.    
  
The second time he’d died and come back, in the same way. The second time he’d gone flatline, found himself on the road to the gates of somewhere, and then been turned away. His fathers soul, was it in hell? Was John suffering because of him? Or because a demon knew that he was a cheap deal? Dean hadn’t remembered dying, but he’d died. He knew he had. He’d woken up when John Winchester sold his soul for Deans survival.    
  
Did that make him a bad son?    
  
He looked out the window as they drove, something in him cracked down the center of his chest, like the ghost of an autopsy that never happened. An ache, where scars should have been. The kind of ache that Dean would be drowning in cheap alcohol and a tipsy tumble, were this not some sort of fever dream in the aftermath of a bad trip.    
  
He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he did remember the woman in the water, and gasped awake on a gurgled scream ten miles north of New Orleans.    
  
Sammy just floored the gas, and they roared for one of the few places that Dean knew he had safe haven. Sam didn’t ask what it was, figured he knew about it. Figured that it was Dean dying that made him make that noise.    
  
Dean didn’t know how to tell him about the woman he’d seen ever since he’d died the first time, always as a nightmare that he had figured was a projection of his own worst fears.    
  
\-----------   
  


The boat eeled through the swamps of Louisiana, the bayou shielding them from pretty much any prying eye that cared to look. Andy and Nicky and Joe didn’t blend in here like Nile did, her big hoops and tidy braids marking her as more of this place than the other three could ever pull off. Maybe that was what she brought, Andy thought. She didn’t blend in because she was invisible, she blended in because she didn’t stand out.    
  
Nile and Nicky conversed with the boatman in rapid French, the creole dialect rolling off Niles tongue the way her great-gran-mere had taught her as a very small child. She’d remembered it for them, here, and Andy liked hearing it. They both teased Nicky about his accent, his archaic vocabulary, schoolboy language the boatman teased, gentle with it. But when he pulled them up to the dock, he still took their money with a nod.    
  
Nile pressed a second roll of bills into his hand, a soft smile on her face as she told him to get something good for his grandbabies, they deserved to have nice things each. She was still generous with her windfalls, and Andromache hoped that she’d never grow out of that generosity. Then they were slipping into the docks of the city, heading for a place that Joe had dreamed about that morning.    
  
The warehouse was where Joe led them, and the big stately car there stood out like a queen in a midden-pile. But nothing had touched it, nobody had so much as smeared a fingerprint on her impeccable finish.    
  
“Whoa.” Nile cooed, looking her over. “That’s a car. Bet she’s loved, to shine like that.”   
  
“Beautiful things are best cared for by ones who love them.” Joe replied, shooting a teasing grin at Nicky, who blinked slowly at him, a knowing sort of quirk to his narrow mouth. He didn’t tease back, busy sliding his pistol out of his coat, taking a ready position at their left.    
  
“Nobody moving inside.” Nile observed from her place to the right of the door, her own pistol in her hand. Andy and Joe both had blades in hand, ready for the silent assault they had perfected over the years.    
  
“Two bodies, upper floor.” Andy responded, and then she did something that surprised them.    
  
She walked up to the door, and knocked on it with a heavy hand.    
  


\------------   
  
The heavy knock startled Dean out of a light doze, and Sam to his feet. Both of them had guns in their hands, trained on the door.    
  
Nobody knew they were here. Nobody could know they were here. Angels, demons, the whole spectrum in the middle, nothing could know they were here through Sams wards. Through the blood and salt Dean had etched sigils into the door with.    
  
“I’ve got it.” Sam said, moving low across the walkway over the warehouse floor. “Hang back, cover me.” he ordered. Like he was protecting Dean, by giving him the high ground.    
  
“We’re not here to fight!” a womans voice called from the door. Sam snorted under his breath at that, checking who it was at the door. Armed, dangerous probably. He peeked through one of the windows only mostly boarded up, a third down the warehouse wall from where the door was, his height making it possible to get sightline on the visitors.    
  
“Why the fuck should I believe you?” he asked, dropping his voice deeper, rougher. Sounding angrier than he was even as he got an angle on the door that would put his forty five round through the black womans skull if she twitched wrong.    
  
“Because your brothers last meal was apple pie, and because he loves you enough to have faith in you.” The man behind the woman with the axe said, voice strong and amused. That…   
  
“Let them in, Sam.” Dean called down, sagging in the doorway he’d been leaned in. “I know who they are. It’s not like they can hurt me.” he said, and Sam looked up at him, eyebrow arched in disbelief.    
  
“Listen to him.” The blonde man said, uncocking his own gun and holstering it. “We are not here to fight. It would seem too that you are also tired of fighting.”    
  
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Dean drawled, wry. He gestured for Sam to open the door. “I take it you’re the hallucinations, right? I don’t normally dream the same shit from different perspectives. You’re not ghosts or djin or even Angels. So…come on in and tell us what you really are.”    
  
Andy looked up at the weary man, and she felt Nile stop beside her, taking her stance at her right as always, ready to leap in front of any gunfire.    
  
“We’re human. At least I think we are.” she said up to him. “My name is Andromache De Scythian, but you can call me Andy.”    
  


  
She didn’t know it, but in that moment, Destiny breathed a soft sigh of relief.


End file.
